MATERIALISM. As a philosophical doctrine, materialism can be given a
deceptively simple definition: the view that matter is all there is. The
simplicity is deceptive because, of course, the term matter can itself be
understood in so many different ways. It is more illuminating, perhaps, to
define materialism in terms of what it denies. It excludes the existence of
entities that are radically different in kind from, and in some sense superior
to, the matter of our ordinary experience. It rejects, therefore, a God or gods
on whom the universe would depend for its existence or mode of operation; it
denies the existence of angels or spirits that can affect the material order
while ultimately escaping its limitations; it questions the notion of a soul, if
taken to be an immaterial entity separable in principle from the human body it
informs. Its two main targets are, therefore, theism and dualistic views of
human nature.

Materialism has, in the past, usually derived from one or the other of two
sources. The first is the conviction that the world can be understood in terms
of a single set of categories derived from our everyday physical experience,
without having to introduce a second set of "immaterial" entities of an
altogether different kind. The second is the criticism of organized religion on
the grounds of its superstitious or politically oppressive character and a
linking of religion with belief in gods, angels, souls, miracles. The former
allies materialism with naturalism. The stress in both is on "natural" modes of
explanation; "supernatural" forms of action are rejected as unnecessary or even
incoherent. Materialism also resembles reductionism, since both seek to reduce
the diversity of the explanations offered for events in the world to a single
category, or at least to a minimal number of categories. There are, for the same
reasons, overtones in it of positivism, at least to the extent that both lay
stress on science as the only legitimate source of knowledge about the
causalities of the world. Where classic materialism would differ from these
other philosophic emphases would be mainly in the specificity of its objections
to the category of "spirit" on which religious belief is taken to rely.

BEGINNINGS
It is to Aristotle (384–322 BCE) that we owe the first explicit articulation of
a concept of "matter," that is, an underlying substratum to which reference must
be made in explaining physical change. Aristotle criticizes the Ionian
physicists, his predecessors of two centuries earlier, because of their
supposedly exclusive reliance on a common underlying "stuff" (water, air, fire)
in explaining change in nature. Such a stuff would retain its own identity
throughout
all change; substantial change would, therefore, be excluded and the apparently
fundamental differences between different kinds (different species of animal,
for instance) would be reduced to mere differences in arrangement of the
fundamental "stuff." Aristotle rejected this "materialist" doctrine. But he did
not believe the Ionians to be materialists. He notes that Thales thought all
things to be "full of gods" and to be in some sense "ensouled"; similar views
are attributed to the other major figures in the early Ionian tradition. Though
these men made the first known attempt to explain physical changes in a
systematic way, they did not question the traditional explanatory roles of the
gods and of soul.

A century later, the founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, came much
closer to a clear-cut materialist doctrine. Their view that all things consist
of "atoms," imperceptibly small, indivisible, eternal, and unchanging entities,
derived from the metaphysical arguments of Parmenides regarding the One, not
from an empirical starting-point in observation. Change is nothing more than the
movement and redistribution of atoms in the void. The planets, the stars, and
even the earth itself have come to be by the aggregating of vortices of atoms.
Since space is infinite, there will be infinitely many worlds produced in this
way. Sensation is to be understood in purely physical terms; the soul itself
consists of atoms, admittedly smaller and finer than even the particles of fire,
but still of the same general kind as other atoms. All interaction is thus
mechanical and explanation in terms of final causes is prohibited. Yet the
atomists do not appear to have excluded the gods. Though Democritus is critical
of those who would base ethical behavior on religious sanctions, he does seem to
allow that the gods may visit men. This may, of course, have been no more than a
concession to the orthodoxy of the day. Yet it would seem more likely that he
had not yet reduced the gods, as he had done soul, to matter.

Epicurus (341–270 BCE) took this further step. The gods are situated in the
intervals between the innumerable universes; they too must be composed of atoms,
and they live in a state of bliss undisturbed by the affairs of mortals.
Lucretius (99–55 BCE) popularized the teachings of Epicurus in the Roman world
through his great poem, De rerum natura, which was the most complete expression
of materialist doctrine in ancient times. The gods here seem to be dismissed
entirely; insofar as there is a deity it is nature itself. Lucretius views the
state religion of Rome as a primarily political institution and sees no reason
for any exception to the atomist claim that all there is, is atoms and void.

THE RENAISSANCE
With the growth of Christianity, the attraction of Epicurean materialism
diminished. During the Middle Ages, atomism was sometimes discussed by
philosophers, but the Aristotelian arguments against it seemed overwhelming.
There could be no serious defense of materialism in an age when the influence of
spirit, in all its forms, seemed so palpable and when no plausible argument had
been found for the claim that all change can be explained in atomic or material
terms only. It was only when the "new science" of mechanics made its appearance
in the seventeenth century that the outlines of an argument became faintly
visible. Galileo and Descartes took for granted that matter is composed of a
multitude of tiny corpuscles whose properties ("primary qualities") are
precisely those required to make them subject to, and entirely predictable by,
mechanical law. There was no real evidence for this, but it seemed plausible to
extend the realm of the new mathematicized mechanics to the very small and thus
make all types of physical change explicable, perhaps, in mechanical terms.

Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) could now revive the ancient Epicurean atomism and
present it as the best available (though admittedly hypothetical) scientific
explanation of the sensory qualities of things. However, he did not carry his
Epicureanism all the way to materialism; though an opponent of the claims to
demonstrative knowledge made by scholastics and Cartesians alike, he was not
disaffected with religion and saw no reason to extend atomism to the soul or to
use it to deny the need for a creator God. His friend Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
had no such scruples. A severe critic of institutional religion, he argued that
mechanical modes of explanation must be extended not only to sensation but to
thought, which is no more than the motion of material particles in the brain.
Nothing other than body can exist, so that God, if he exists (and Hobbes's real
views on this issue are very difficult to discover), must be corporeal.

REDUCTIVE MATERIALISM
If all material things are to be understood by a single set of laws, the general
laws of mechanics, it would follow that human action, too, can be reduced to
mechanical law. This is the conclusion Hobbes reached; Descartes avoided it only
by placing within man an immaterial mind. Reductive materialism or sharp
dualism—these seemed to be the only options, if one decided to bring the entire
domain of physical interaction under one science. Most philosophers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found the alternatives unappealing, but it
was not at all evident where a stable solution might be found. In France, where
reaction against royal as well as ecclesiastical authority continued to mount,
reductive materialism found favor with a number of writers, of whom the most
original was Denis Diderot (1713–1784), editor of the great Encyclopedia.
Influenced by George-Louis Buffon's Natural History (1749), he speculated about
the sort of developmental laws that might have brought about the organic world
we know from an initial chaos of material particles. A number of medical
writers, of whom the most notable was Julien de La Mettrie (1709–1751), were at
the same time developing a materialist physiology in which human action is
reduced to simple mechanical causes. Paul d'Holbach (1723–1789), on the other
hand, was much more metaphysical in his approach. His Système de la nature
(1770) was the most thoroughgoing materialist statement of the century; in it,
the two sources of classic materialism are especially evident: a conviction that
because matter is one, only one sort of explanation is permissible, and a strong
hostility to religion.

But the weaknesses of this kind of material monism were still evident. The
claims to explain in mechanical terms the operations of the human body, to
reduce sensation and thought to mechanical action between molecules, and to
derive the profusion of organic species from an original undifferentiated matter
were still almost entirely promissory. Materialism was still, at best, a
program, not an achieved philosophy. To become something more, a genuine
materialist science would have to be available to serve as support. And one of
the fundamental premises of classic materialism, its reductionist principle,
might have to be abandoned.

Major philosophers of the day were struck by the crudity, as they saw it, of the
materialist doctrine. Hegel, in particular, attacked the mechanistic
presuppositions of Newtonian science, its assumption that all motion can be
explained by the single science of mechanics. In its stead, he attempted to
construct a philosophy of nature and a theory of history in which spirit is the
moving force. Motion involves contradiction, since for it to occur, a body has
to be "both here and not here at the same time." Thus, contradiction pervades
both nature and society; it is out of the consequent struggle and opposition
that advance comes.

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
The most influential form of nonreductive materialism is undoubtedly that of
Marx and Engels. Marx took over much of the structure of Hegel's account of
society and of social change, retaining the discontinuities of the Hegelian
"dialectical" method, but inverting the order of matter and mind. Mind
originates from matter (as the reductive materialists had held), but in a
discontinuous way that makes it irreducible to the categories of matter (which
they had denied). Beliefs in God or in an immortal soul are no more than the
projections of those who would rationalize an unjust social order instead of
trying to change it. All knowledge of the world and of society must be based on
sense experience and ultimately on science.

Marx's "historical materialism" is restricted to human history; by taking
economic and industrial factors as the fundamental agencies of change, Marx
believed that he could give a thoroughly "materialist" (i.e., empirical,
naturalistic, scientific) account of history. Engels went on to a broader focus
on nature. His "dialectical materialism" (as Plekhanov later called it) is first
and foremost a philosophy of nature in the Hegelian tradition. He rejects Ludwig
Büchner's claim that the sciences alone suffice; in Engels's view (and this has
become a central tenet of Marxist-Leninist thought), positivism is inadequate
because the sciences have to be supplemented by a unified and guiding
philosophy. This philosophy is "dialectical" because it recognizes the presence
of contradictions and of discontinuous change in nature and is unified insofar
as it proposes a scheme that can grasp things in their totality. Engels
characterizes as "idealist" any philosophical view that would deny that mind and
spirit must originate from matter. Thus, anyone who believes in a transcendent
God or in the dualism of soul (mind) and body would automatically qualify as
"idealist" in this new sense.

The attempt on the part of Marx and Engels to "materialize Hegel" led to notable
internal strain (many have argued, incoherence) within the materialism they
proposed. On the one hand, there is the stress on the primacy of
sense-experience (which is said to "reflect" the world) and consequently of
science. On the other, the dialectical element (which is crucial to Marx's
political theory) is difficult to sustain by science alone, unless it be almost
emptied of content. This tension is even more evident in Lenin's version of
dialectical materialism, which tries to mediate between positivism and Hegelian
idealism, utilizing a rather naive realist epistemology.

CHRISTIANITY AND MATERIALISM
The progress of science since the mid-nineteenth century has undercut the older
reductive materialism by showing that the categories of mechanics at any one
time are never definitive and that there are, besides, different levels of
explanation that are probably not reducible to one another, not in the sense in
which reduction was supposed to be possible, at least. On the other hand, the
progress of science has also demonstrated the strength of the naturalistic
program of explanation. More and more, it seems possible to explain the entire
order of nature in a single interlinked set of categories that leave no gaps "of
principle" into which a different order of causality has to be interposed in
order to render a coherent account of world process. It is hard not to be a
"naturalist" in that sense.

Nonetheless, there are unsolved philosophical problems about the relation of
mind and body, about the reality of human freedom in a world scientifically
fully explicable, that have led to the formulation of alternatives besides that
of a sophisticated nonreductive materialism, alternatives that would still
maintain a broadly naturalist orientation. These would differ from materialism
in the degree of stress they would lay on causal categories that derive from the
domain of mind and freedom rather than from that of mechanical action even if
the term mechanical be construed as broadly as it could plausibly be.

When naturalism/materialism is carried to the point of denying the possibility
of a creator God or an afterlife for man, a conflict with religious, and
specifically with Christian, belief is unavoidable. Christian theologians,
however, have gone to some lengths to try to show that the notions of the
natural order as sufficient in its own right, or of resurrection as independent
of a strong dualism of soul and body, are perfectly compatible with—indeed
entirely faithful to—the Christian tradition. The grounds for the materialist
exclusion in principle of God or of a personal afterlife are thus brought into
question.

Some have gone further to argue the propriety of a "Christian materialism" that
would draw on the positive insights of the materialist tradition, particularly
in its Marxist form. Such a view would suggest that all that happens in nature
and in history is in principle explicable at its own level without directly
invoking the intervening agency of God. "Christian materialism" would note and
deplore the manner
in which Christianity, like other religions, has often allowed itself to become
the ideological legitimation of structures of social domination. It would oppose
the "idealism" that would make Christianity a set of doctrines to be believed
rather than a doctrine of redemption that finds its reality first in action and
transformation.

The limits of such a view are set by the Christian doctrines of the dependence
of nature and history on divine grace and of the entrance of the Word of God, as
man, into the human story. There would be the reality to acknowledge of a God
whose action entirely transcends the categories of nature. And that is something
that materialism cannot do without ceasing (it would seem) to be materialism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The most detailed general history of materialism is still Friedrich Lange's
Geschichte des Materialismus (Marburg, 1865), translated by E. C. Thomas as The
History of Materialism (London, 1925). Many helpful essays will be found in The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards (New York, 1967); see, in
particular, Keith Campbell's "Materialism"; H. B. Acton's "Dialectical
Materialism" and "Historical Materialism"; G. E. R. Lloyd's "Leucippus and
Democritus"; R. S. Peters's "Hobbes, Thomas"; and Norman L. Torrey's "Diderot,
Denis." For a survey of the varied roles played by the concept of matter in the
history of philosophy and of science, see The Concept of Matter, edited by me
(Notre Dame, Ind., 1963), especially the essay by Nicholas Lobkowicz,
"Materialism and Matter in Marxism-Leninism," pp. 430–464. For further reading
on Marxist versions of materialism, see Gustav A. Wetter's Der dialecktische
Materialismus (Vienna, 1952), translated by Peter Heath as Dialectical
Materialism (London, 1958). For a useful historical study of the strains within
the Soviet development of materialism, see David Joravsky's Soviet Marxism and
Natural Science, 1917–1932 (London, 1961). In his A Matter of Hope: A
Theologian's Reflections on the Thought of Karl Marx (Notre Dame, Ind., 1982),
Nicholas Lash defends the view that "it is the 'materialist' rather than the
'idealist' forms of Christianity which conform most closely to the demands of
obedience to the gospel" (p. 148).

New Sources
Carrier, James. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since
1700. New York, 1995.

Gillet, Carl, and Barry Loewer, eds. Physicalism and Its Discontents. New York,
2001.